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Girls on stage. Where?

Tonight Sweden and Swedish music is polarised between Gothenburg and Metaltown in the East and Stockholm and Summerburst in the West.

Some will say Summerburst is for brats wearing pink shirts and backslick hair, paying a fortune to see a guy play a bunch of pre-recorded CDs, whilst others will say Metaltown is for long haired goths in black clothes and corpse paint watching men scream about Mordor on stage. Both ideas are of course wrong but you get the picture. What truly unites the two otherwise very different events is the love for music, and I am sorry to be negative here, the lack of women on stage.

ICONA POP are a rare exception at Summerburst (we got Ida Engberg too) and I think Within Temptation’s Sharon del Adel may be the only woman on stage at Metaltown. Where are all the women? (Other than in the snapshots we get from the Summerburst broadcast where girls are dancing in bikinis? How empowering.)

It didn’t help that the magazine I edit was given three free press tickets to Metaltown instead of the four we have been given previous year. The one left without a ticket was of course me, or the only female out of the four who applied and one of very few girls in the industry at all. Apparently it was unintentional.

I feel Sweden, a country that loves identifying itself with words like “equality”, “freedom” and “inclusion”, as well as a country that is widely known for its music export, has one or two things to rethink.

Because nights like these are meant for all – off, and on, stage. Demand it, ladies!